Hey there! I am Leonie Finke, an honors college student and Neuroscience and International Studies major. This semester I continued my work on understanding the complex and bidirectional relationships between aging, loneliness, and depression in the Geriatric Psychiatry Neuroimaging (GPN) lab under Dr. Howard Aizenstein, MD, PhD.

I received the Chancellors Undergraduate Research Fellowship last Fall for my work in this field and was extremely grateful to have the opportunity to continue my work this semester through the Frederick Honors College Research Fellowship. To read about how I found this research topic, check out my blog post from the previous fellowship here.

A Brief Introduction to my Research

Have you ever felt lonely? The experience is a universal one and affects many different aspects of our mental health. While social isolation is the objective absence of social connections or a supportive social network, loneliness is the subjective perception of lacking social support. Initial studies have shown that both social isolation and loneliness are risk factors for late-life depression in older adults and may affect treatment success of various anti-depressants. Our own data showed that there are complex bidirectional relationships between these variables – social isolation, late-life depression, age, etc.. The next step in this project is to look at the effect of loneliness on treatment success and on the potentially beneficial effect of inter-generational engagement to combat the common pattern of age-related loneliness.

Reflecting on my Progress

My biggest lesson this semester is one that may be disheartening at first, but it has a happy ending (I promise): frustration is a real part of research, so ask for help. Having effectively gained a good introduction into my field of research last year, it was now time to narrow down and get technical. This meant gaining a better understanding of fMRI and literacy in coding (inc. R and Python) and which, to be completely honest, did not go too well.

Being a senior in the lab, with many new additions since I joined, and, having so successfully completed a literature review titled, “Understanding the Relationships between Late-Life Depression and Loneliness in Older Adults: Symptoms, Pathology, Treatment, and the Role of fMRI as a Predictor” in the spring, I was left to (as successfully) dive deeper into the concepts I had reviewed and to subsequently begin analysis. Here, I unfortunately stumbled and, ultimately, came to a bit of a standstill.

Don’t get me wrong: I’ve done plenty of data analysis before, but it had always been with variables that were – to me, at least – a lot more concrete: body weight, cell counts, energy metabolism. Now, however, I was working with spreadsheets in which I couldn’t even decipher the column names!

Furthermore, I became increasingly aware of how complex and decidedly not concrete fMRI is as a whole: in my Neuroscience classes we had worked, generally, off of a map of anatomical structures that created distinct lines, shapes, etc. Now, however, I faced the full chaos of real brain data and the hard-hitting truth that there is much in our brains that still isn’t clear.

For a while, I struggled, getting seemingly nowhere and facing increasing imposter syndrome. Was I the only one not getting this?

Then, on a rainy day in early October, I bumped into another GPN student researcher in the Rite Aid on Forbes. We started talking and I began to realize that, no, I wasn’t alone. “Just talk to her,” she advised, referring to our research supervisor. And I did.

Did I get kicked out of the lab? Did I lose my funding? Would I never recover from this? No.

The moment I reached out, I was scheduled for a meeting with the supervisor, our PI, and a graduate student, who ultimately became my mentor. Now, I am learning the techniques I need alongside another undergrad under this graduate student and it all makes a lot more sense.

So why am I telling you this? Because you should know that you are not alone and that asking for help is good. The expectation for us to excel at everything immediately is a harmful one, and part of research is the frustration of figuring things out. But you don’t have to go it alone.